Everything old is new again — except the speed and scale of today. We love to think our digital tools are shiny brand-new inventions. But a lot of the ways we communicate today have roots much deeper than you’d expect. Here are five modern “inventions” that are reliving past lives.
1. Emojis
Your phone’s emoji keyboard might feel like a product of the 2010s, but we were all using little pictograms long before then. In fact, the very first sideways smiley face :-) is credited to computer scientist Scott Fahlman on a message board in 1983. His idea was simple: use :-) for jokes, :-( for serious posts. The concept caught fire, spreading through early internet culture.
Who knew ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?
And of course, if you take the very long view, humans have been using pictures to represent feelings and ideas since cave paintings and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Emojis are just the latest stage in that very old habit.
2. Artificial Intelligence
Across a whole range of tasks, it’s getting harder and harder – if we had our eyes closed anyway – to tell if we’re interacting and collaborating with a human or an AI. Probably you’ve already talked (ie, not messaged) to ChatGPT, and had a conversation at least as fluid, informed and natural as, say, a chat with your dentist. We think of this as very now, very new.
But it was 1950 when British computer pioneer Alan Turing proposed a blind test where a person would interact with first another human and then a machine on a graded task. If the person was unable to tell which was which, then the Turing Test was passed, and a benchmark for machine intelligence would be set. So in one sense, AI is already 75 years old.
"The first useful chatbot dates back to 1966"
The first useful chatbot dates back to 1966. ELIZA, created at MIT, simulated a psychotherapist by asking vague, reflective questions like “How does that make you feel?” It was simple, but people got surprisingly emotionally attached to it.
What’s changed – is constantly changing – is the skill level of the task, and the means by which the machine achieves it. In the 1960s tasks were simple, and humans programmed machines how to respond. Today, tasks are incredibly challenging and machines write their own rules, after being shown ‘what good looks like’ -training.
3. Phones (and even video calls!)
We take phones for granted, but to snip the wire off a handset and have it work pretty much everywhere is a massive technical challenge. So it might come as a surprise to know that the very first ‘mobile’ call was made in 1973 by Martin Cooper of Motorola. The phone weighed at least a kilo and had a 30-minute battery life (so, not quite pocket-friendly).
And the ‘G’ thing? Each G brings a generational leap in capabilities for consumers and operators. What’s interesting is that between 1876 (Bell’s first call) and 1973, there had really only been 2 generations of wired telephony. In the following 50 years, there were 5 generations of mobile telephony with a sixth on the horizon. In that span mobile went digital, data capable, multimedia and Internet connected, and got a modem as fast as your fibre broadband at home. Not too shabby.
"Snipping the wire of a handset and have it work pretty much everywhere is a massive technical challenge."
Back to multimedia. The concept of video calls goes back even further than mobile phones —AT&T demoed a “picturephone” at the 1939 World’s Fair. It didn’t catch on because the tech was clunky and expensive, but the dream of face-to-face calling has been around for nearly a century.
4. Email and Texting
Email feels like a 1990s dot-com invention, but the very first network email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. (Fun fact: he also picked the @ symbol to separate usernames from host names, shaping how we still use email addresses today.) SMS texting officially kicked off in 1992 with a simple “Merry Christmas” message. But shorthand, fast communication goes back much further. Telegraph operators in the 19th century had their own version of LOLs and BRBs—abbreviated “codes” to save time and money.
5. Memes
Internet memes feel like one of the most modern forms of expression, but the term “meme” wasn’t invented online. Biologist Richard Dawkins coined it in 1976 to describe how ideas spread and evolve—kind of like cultural genes. Long before the internet, jokes, slogans, and viral ideas were spreading in meme-like fashion: think political cartoons, catchphrases, or even chain letters. The digital age just gave memes rocket fuel.
Communication feels new because the platforms change. But the core ideas—symbols, quick shorthand, shared jokes, talking machines—have been with us for decades, even centuries. We’re just remixing old ideas in new formats.
Of course, not everything is a remix. What is new is the sheer scale and speed of communication today. Never before could a single message reach millions in seconds, personalized by algorithms for each recipient. And tools like AI content generation and virtual reality meetings are creating entirely new ways of connecting that our ancestors never imagined.
Still, whether old or new, the same “rules” seem to apply:
- People always want to save effort.
- Humour and play spread faster than almost anything else.
- Outrage and negativity travel just as quickly — from scandalous pamphlets in the 1700s to inflammatory content on X.
- Etiquette always lags behind technology.
- Tools start playful, then turn serious.
- And every “new” platform borrows a little from the old ones.
The lesson? However wild the future of communication looks, we’ll probably recognise more of it than we expect — the good, the bad, and the cat memes.
What do you think?